The online
hangout Facebook is getting more serious about grammar. No
more should users see jarringly incorrect declarations such
as "Debbie changed their profile picture."
The online
hangout Facebook is getting more serious about grammar. No
more should users see jarringly incorrect declarations such
as "Debbie changed their profile picture."
Users who haven't
specified their gender in their Facebook profiles will
be asked to do so in the coming weeks. That way Facebook
doesn't have to default to "their" or the made-up word
"themselves," as it had been doing.
While not knowing
someone's gender poses grammatical challenges in
English, it has created even larger headaches as Facebook
expands to other languages, where a gender-neutral
option isn't available in plural form.
"People who
haven't selected what sex they are frequently get
defaulted to the wrong sex entirely," Naomi Gleit, a
Facebook product manager, wrote Friday in a company
blog.
Transgender
people and other users who find the male-female distinction
too limiting will still have the option of removing gender
entirely from their profiles.
This isn't the
first time Facebook -- one of the world's most popular
social-networking sites with some 80 million users worldwide
-- has had to confront grammar.
At first members
were restricted in what they could say in "status
updates" for their friends, as in "Nick is wasting time on
Facebook." Each update had started with the member's name
and "is," followed by a blank box.
Late last year
Facebook quietly dropped the "is," allowing users to
supply their own verb and write updates such as "Nick just
wasted time on Facebook." (AP)
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